Post-Practicum Reflection, FRST 495, University of British Columbia, 3/25/21

I taught my second practicum lecture in Biological Diversity and Forest Management (FRST 495), which is taught by my program mentor Nolan Bett. This course is based almost entirely on guest lectures from professors, disciplinary practitioners outside academia, and graduate students. About half the class are also students in Fish Conservation and Management (CONS 486), the class that I TA and the venue for my first practicum lecture.

Originally, I was planning to teach about the overall state of Pacific salmon ecology and conservation and had discussed this with Nolan and my advisor Dr. Hinch. However, I decided that the students are pretty well versed in this area after teaching a salmon-related lesson for my first practicum and observing several of Dr. Hinch’s lectures for CONS 486 that incorporated aspects of this subject. Instead, I got the idea to teach about Pacific herring. Pacific herring have similar ecological importance as a keystone species supplementing both marine and terrestrial trophic systems, and similarly high profile struggles over conservation and management. Taking on this subject meant more of a challenge as I had to learn nearly all of the content from scratch while constructing the lesson, but I was enthusiastic about doing so and am glad I chose the topic.

I put particular effort into highlighting ways of seeing and acting for three entities involved in the herring fishery and its management: First Nations, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), and the commercial fishing industry. I gave historical context for both the development of Indigenous and commercial fisheries and how they have been managed over time. I also framed a debate by relating the pros and cons of the last remaining commercial herring fishery in the Straight of Georgia. My aim for this was to show how the views of these three respective disciplinary practitioner groups develop, the socioeconomic factors that influence them, and how this affects management. With this context, I asked students to assess the management situation and consider/choose/discuss how they would approach regulations moving forward if they were a practitioner with those responsibilities.

To conclude the lesson I included an interesting study advocating for an approach incorporating ecosystem modeling and values to identify and prioritize tradeoffs in managing the herring fishery (Lam et al. 2019). I adapted the survey of values and management preferences that the authors had Haida individuals as well as members of the commercial industry respond to, and used that as a participatory annotation exercise for the students. As a follow-up we discussed how the findings from the survey could be combined with ecological data and put into use. I think this was an effective connection between some of the theories I included and how they could be used in practice.

In the future if teaching this lesson I’ll heed Nolan’s suggestion for improvement and allocate more time for probing the student responses during the participatory activities, especially rationale regarding opinions about management options. This potentially could have led to interesting thoughts surfacing that I hadn’t anticipated, or perhaps exposed misunderstandings that I could have cleared up. In any case, it would have given students more time articulate their thoughts, reflect on why they approach the subject the way they do, and try on other students’ perspectives and different frames of reference. To free up more time for these discussions I’d cut down on some of the historical context covering changes since the advent of colonial fisheries, and condense a timeline of events (3 slides) I provided.

Overall, I think the lesson was well received and I am proud of how it went! The students were engaged throughout in the chat and during participatory activities, and I received many thoughtful questions at the end. I was happy with the visuals throughout the presentation and the variety of content and perspectives I covered (and Nolan provided me with positive student feedback corroborating this). I think it had a nice mix of ecology, history, and socioeconomic considerations that provided a fairly holistic view (for a single lesson) of Pacific herring ecology and management in British Columbia. However, because of this ambitious scope I packed in a hefty amount of content and moved at a slightly faster pace than I usually do. I think this is further reason to assess which content is most essential for the key considerations I’d like to get across, and package it with more time for discussion and reflection in the future.